The Book of Jonah Read online

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  To Mom & Dad, with love

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I. New York (Forty Days and Forty Nights Earlier)

  II. “In Case of Loss, Please Return To _____”

  III. Amsterdam, or the Belly of the Whale

  IV. Nineveh, or Las Vegas

  V. The Desert, the Ocean

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Reading Group Gold

  Copyright

  The last of the road sank into the heat shimmer of the horizon behind—and Jonah saw in every direction the unbounded desert—the scrub clinging to its face giving its tracts the look of a vast, sealike rolling. And he lay down with his back on the scorched sand and with his face toward the sun, relentless and colorless—and he unfurled for the Lord his sorrow.

  JONAH 5:1

  I. NEW YORK (FORTY DAYS AND FORTY NIGHTS EARLIER)

  PROLOGUE. THE SMIDGE

  Jonah knew the 59th Street subway station well enough that he did not have to look up from his iPhone as he made his way among its corridors and commuters to the track. He felt lucky as he came down the stairs to the platform to see a train just pulling in—he boarded without breaking his stride, took a seat by the door of the nearly empty car, went on typing. A crowd of people flooded in at the next station, but Jonah felt he’d had a long enough day that he need not give up his seat. But then an older woman—frumpy, blue-haired, with a grandmotherly sweet face and a tiny bell of a nose—ended up standing directly before him, and Jonah decided to do the right thing and he stood.

  He was not on the train long, but when he got off he saw that many of those moving past him on the platform were soaking wet: hair matted to foreheads, clothes translucent and sagging. They all bore it well, though, Jonah thought—stoically marched ahead with mouths fixed, eyes straight, as though they got drenched during every evening commute. Then, as he came to the stairwell leading up to the street, he found that a group of twenty, thirty people was standing semicircled around the bottom, not continuing out. Jonah advanced a few steps. Rain cascaded down onto the concrete stairs in an unbroken sheet, making the light shining into the station pale and misty, as if they were all gathered behind a waterfall. Those in the group shrugged to one another at their predicament—tapped away on their smartphones or just stared placidly at the rain, seemingly admiring this temporary transformation of the world outside. Some, having stood there for a few moments, turned up their collars or held out their umbrellas and flung themselves up the steps with a sort of reckless bravery. Those coming into the station—umbrellas bent, hair dripping—looked puzzled at the gathering below, as though finding a crowd of people in the subway unmoving, unshoving—even by and large content to be there—made their surroundings somehow unrecognizable.

  Jonah had been running late when he’d left his office, but he knew QUEST events were always well attended; his absence from tonight’s cocktail party for another ten or so minutes wouldn’t make much difference. He had time, in another words, to stand there and wait out the rain, too—and he found he was glad for this momentary interruption of his day. He had lived in New York for almost a decade now, and was gratified to find, once again, that it could still surprise him.

  Jonah Daniel Jacobstein was thirty-two; a lawyer; ambitious, unmarried and dating; never without his iPhone. For all these reasons, his concerns tended to be immediate, tangible, billable. But every now and then such moods of appreciation would wash over him. He would glance out the window of the Q train as it crossed over the Manhattan Bridge and would take in the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the whole of the skyline over the river; he would climb into a taxi on a Friday night with crisp bills from the ATM in his pocket and Sylvia (or Zoey) to meet; he would be drunk at 4:00 A.M. with a great slice of grease-dripping pizza in his hand; and he would count himself incredibly lucky—as he did now, watching the rain in the subway station—to be who he was, when he was, where he was.

  But these moods never lasted long, of course, and after a moment he checked his phone again—this having become an almost autonomic response in him, on the order of blinking. He’d gotten a dozen new emails since he’d boarded the train. That afternoon, a case he had spent the better part of a year working on had come to a settlement favorable to his clients. He was pleased to see in his inbox several congratulatory messages from colleagues—even a few from partners.

  He dropped his hand back to his side and saw that a very large Hasidic Jew had appeared beside him: pink-faced, jowly, in black hat, black coat, forelocks dangling gently at his ears, his beard jet-black, wiry and unkempt. The man was only a little older than Jonah, though he was much bigger—an enormous stomach protruding directly outward from above his waist. And he stared with peculiar scrutiny at the rain, as though he could recognize some subtle meaning in its drops.

  Normally, Jonah was an avid follower of the New York convention of never under any circumstances striking up a conversation on the subway with a stranger. But he was feeling cheerful—and there appeared to have been some temporary reordering of New York conventions, anyway. And, too, Jonah, whose own Judaism was characterized by deep ambivalence, had always had a certain curiosity regarding those Jews whose Judaism seemed characterized by life-consuming certainty. Recognizing this as one of his few opportunities to talk with such a member of his (ostensible, theoretical) brethren, he turned to the Hasid and said, “Don’t you have a number to call when this happens?”

  In response, the Hasid pulled the sides of his fleshy face into a grin—sly, knowing—exposing yellowed teeth. He said, “You think I’d be on the train if I could make the rain stop?” Jonah chuckled. “You’re on your way to some business meeting, my friend?”

  “No, my day’s over. I’m just going to, an event…” He found he was reluctant to call the cocktail party a charity event, though QUEST was indisputably a charity; describing it that way, however, struck him as somehow disingenuous. But the Hasid gave him a look of being greatly impressed by his answer.

  “I could see you were a man of the world. Where would we be without such people?” His voice was rich-toned, Russian-accented, and a little high-pitched, in a decidedly wry sort of way. “You have a business card, my friend?”

  This request surprised Jonah, but he didn’t see any harm in it—he reached into his jacket pocket and handed the Hasid one of his cards. “You’re Jewish, my friend!” the Hasid said, still more impressed. He studied the card carefully, as if he was taking note of each line, each digit in each of the three phone numbers.

  “Well, I was raised Jewish,” Jonah answered.

  “And you study Torah, my friend?” the Hasid asked, now returning the card. “Do you keep the Sabbath?”

  “I feel guilty on Yom Kippur.”

  The Hasid’s grin broadened. “And you know, of course, the story of your namesake, Jonah, son of Amittai?”

  Jonah’s knowledge of such things had been halfheartedly acquired in the first place, was half remembered at best. “There was a whale…” he ventured.

  “Oh, my friend, there is much more than the whale!” The Hasid had now moved his massive frame a little closer toward Jonah, whose back was already up against the side of a MetroCard machine. “Jonah was a man of the world, too, just like you. Going about his business, making deals. Then one day HaShem
came to him and said, ‘Jonah, go to the corrupt city of Nineveh and tell them that while they have gold, finery, vast armies, only their body is clothed, but their soul is naked.’” Here the Hasid winked; Jonah nodded uncertainly, not quite sure what to make of this. “But Jonah had other ideas,” the Hasid went on. “He tried to flee from the sight of the Lord. And what do you think happened? Storms, whales, disaster.

  “HaShem sees everything,” the Hasid continued, waving a playful finger beneath Jonah’s nose. “We think we can hide, but in the end there’s no escaping.” He inclined his thick-bottomed chin up toward the stairs, where the rain was tapering only slightly. “Look what happens when the Lord sends even a little rain. Everyone runs underground, none can tell his right hand from his left. Won’t it be so much more on the Day of Judgment, when calamity rains down from afar?” Again, Jonah could only nod, not sure with how much sincerity the still-grinning Hasid was asking. “One day it’s all a big party. Then the angels knock on Lot’s door. What will you tell them? Remember, not everyone gets a seat on the ark. America is naked, my friend, as naked as Nineveh. Cell phones, computers, spaceships, yadda yadda yadda. The body is clothed, but the soul is naked.”

  Jonah believed he was learning all over again why you were supposed to avoid entering into these conversations. “Well, it’s all very interesting,” he said. “In any case…”

  This social cue toward ending the encounter was unnoticed or ignored. “You can’t hide on the subway from the Lord’s outstretched hand,” the Hasid went on, “any more than Jonah could hide on the seas. Wouldn’t you rather be counted among the righteous when the arrogant are washed away?”

  “I don’t think the arrogant are going anywhere.”

  “Im yirtse HaShem, we will live to see their destruction!” the Hasid cried.

  It was all made the more disconcerting by the persistence of the wry grin on the Hasid’s face. Though the rain was still falling heavily, Jonah edged his way around the MetroCard machine toward the stairs. But the Hasid leaned his head and large stomach even closer to Jonah—his breath unpleasantly musty. “Remember, my friend, the Lord seeks out what has gone by. Nineveh, the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah. Don’t you know history is full of 9/11s?”

  With this, Jonah’s patience, which varied in length but not in the consistency of the irritability to which it gave way, was exhausted. Implications that he was damned he could tolerate—because who could take that seriously?—but moralizing about 9/11 was a different story. He had been in the city that day: And no, he had not lost anyone close to him, had not been in any immediate danger—but he felt he had experienced enough of it that he shouldn’t have to endure hearing it characterized as some sort of divine punishment. “If you really think God had anything to do with 9/11, you’re as ignorant as the people who did it.”

  The Hasid looked deeply saddened, and shook his head gravely. “Oh, my friend, I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood everything. It’s my fault. I didn’t go to Harvard College.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “Nu, you think it matters to HaShem what you think is ignorant?”

  And though the Hasid capped the question with a final and more definitive wink—as though the whole conversation were merely a shared joke between them—Jonah decided he had heard enough and walked over to the stairs and mounted them two at a time. “Your bar mitzvah won’t save you, my friend!” the Hasid cried—and maybe even guffawed as he said it.

  The rain continued to fall steadily, quickly began soaking Jonah’s hair, the shoulders of his suit jacket. He saw a few people huddled beneath the overhang in front of a discount shoe store—he ran over and pressed himself against the windows. Jonah didn’t think anyone knew what mattered to HaShem—or whatever you wanted to call it—but he felt he understood the Hasid’s point perfectly: You drew a circle around yourself, and everyone inside the circle was righteous and everyone outside it was not. There wasn’t much more to the Hasid’s philosophy—such as it was—than that.

  He found himself standing beside a scruffy-looking black man—lanky, in a sweat-stained Yankees cap and cargo shorts, with large headphones over his ears, smoking the fingernail-sized remnants of a joint. He was rapping along with the music he was listening to: “Everybody got they own thang—currency chasin’! Worldwide through th’hard time—worryin’ faces! Shed tears bury niggas close to the heart, was a friend now a ghost in the dark,” the man chanted rhythmlessly, raspingly, then took a hit. Jonah knew he’d heard the song many times, though he couldn’t immediately identify it. And it occurred to him how much more comfortable he was standing here beside this man than he was with the Hasid. Then Jonah remembered.

  “Tupac,” he said aloud.

  The man with the headphones turned and looked at him, glanced up and down at his suit suspiciously—and then laughed huskily, smoke pouring from his mouth. “Tupac!” the man cried. “He ain’t dead!”

  “He ain’t dead,” Jonah agreed.

  This encounter, Jonah felt, was a better answer—a better retort—than any he might have given to the Hasid. Who could ever say who was righteous, and who was not; who was saved, and who was damned? Staying open to the world and its inhabitants—living life—having fun—that was what mattered. If he had a circle, Jonah thought pridefully, this was the compass with which he would draw it.

  * * *

  After a few minutes the storm had diminished to the stray drop here and there, and Jonah began walking the last blocks to the QUEST cocktail party. As he made his way down the damp sidewalks of Greenwich Village into SoHo, wet and wary people emerged from doorways and bars, casting mistrustful eyes skyward. At a crosswalk he had to leap—phone clutched tightly—over a massive puddle at a clogged storm drain. Then, going a few blocks farther south, he reached the venue: the unelaborately named 555 Thompson Street, a blue-tinted sign mounted behind glass on the door confirming that this was indeed the location of the 4th Annual QUEST for New York Schools Cocktail Event and Silent Auction.

  As he restraightened his tie, neatened his hair by way of running his fingers through it, he tried to recall precisely what QUEST stood for; something like Quantitative Educational Skills and Tools was about right. The organization was a nonprofit started by a dazzlingly charismatic Harvard MBA named Aaron Seyler, who did quantitative analysis consulting on Wall Street. As the narrative on the QUEST website had it, Aaron had decided he wanted to do more with his life than improve annual returns by quarter points: He wanted to make a lasting contribution to the city where he’d become a success (though having met Aaron and seen him schmooze, Jonah suspected he’d have been a success even in a city where they still used shells and beads for currency). The idea of QUEST was to apply the quantitative tools of finance to improving what were called educational outcomes: graduation rates, test scores, college matriculation, and so forth. Aaron’s vision, as he was wont to explain, was to harness the energy and insight that daily went into generating billions of dollars for banks and hedge funds toward the betterment of New York City’s public schools.

  Which was all well and good as far as Jonah—now pushing open the door to 555 Thompson—was concerned. He had been raised in a terrifically liberal household and town—and though his politics had been moderated by exposure to the non-terrifically liberal world outside of Roxwood, Massachusetts (and lately by necessity from working for the sort of megalithic corporations he had been brought up to despise), his politics remained essentially liberal in character. He had yet to hear an argument that made him doubt you should do all you could for the underserved and underprivileged. More money for schools? That sounded good to him. But he was not much of a joiner—not really one for causes, groups, committees. His politics were manifested mainly in voting Democratic, reading some Paul Krugman, and avoiding racial/sexual invective. In fact, it was unlikely he would have attended the QUEST event at all, except Philip Orengo, a friend from law school, was on the board, and Jonah hadn’t seen him in a while; and he had gotten out of work relativ
ely early; and Sylvia was out of town and Zoey was with her (nominal) boyfriend; and, not least, there would be an open bar. All that plus successfully completing a major case had seemed to him a good reason to have a few drinks. Yet though he understood it was this combination of convenience and circumstance that had led him to buy the seventy-five-dollar ticket—as he emerged from an entry corridor into the venue proper—it still struck Jonah that his attendance proved some implicit point in his argument with the Hasid.

  The space was massive, square, brick-walled, with mod-industrial stylings: exposed ducts ran along the three-story ceiling, a catwalk was suspended above all four sides of a central floor area, where people mingled and later might dance. The walls were hung with gold-red bunting and drapery, which made a nice complement to the red brickwork and the black of the catwalk (and the fact that Jonah recognized this color coordination made him realize just how much time he was spending with fashion-conscious young women, between seeing his girlfriend and his not-his-girlfriend). A bar stretched the length of one wall, and a stage toward the back was set up with a microphone flanked by placards displaying the QUEST insignia: the dollar-bill eye pyramid, with a sort of archetypal schoolhouse in its pupil. The space was nearly filled, as Jonah had guessed it would be. It was a large though not unpleasantly packed-in crowd of men and women, mostly Jonah’s age or thereabouts—professionals, for the most part, dressed in the suits and skirts they’d worn to work. As Jonah made his way inward, he passed several quite attractive young women; everyone had drinks in their hands, and something in a Cuban jazz mode played as background to the great indistinguishable mix of genial or perfunctory or flirty conversation. In short—the entire scene looked like a lot of fun.

  And in hypothetical continuation of the dispute with the Hasid, Jonah acknowledged to himself the frivolity of all this—and by way of riposte, thought of all the times in which life made frivolity impossible, how frivolity was a sort of collective decision by those engaged in it, how often life conspired against it: So why not drink, flirt, and make merry? There were meetings in the morning, there were breakups down the road, everyone in this room would attend their fair share of funerals. He was not really a fatalist, but his training and experience as a lawyer had taught him that you didn’t have to believe in an argument for it to be effective—and so he felt justified in starting his evening of charity by grabbing a beer.